President Roosevelt's budget message to the seventy-third Congress lends yet more credence to the view held by such realistic optimists as myself that the country is in the hands of men who are as competent in the economics as they are in the politics of recovery under capitalism. As an enthusiastic and not unbiased observer of the professional sideshow being staged by the Harvard Economics Department (de facto) and the banks versus the Columbia Economics department (de jure) and the Roosevelt legend, I cannot help but conclude that the latter group has kept more than one step ahead of the former by conjuring up a lot of cardboard windmills, notably gold buying, silver buying, and in a sense, even the N. R. A. itself, to divert the attention of the "conservative" opposition while the really important recovery measures are being taken.

As a brain truster recently remarked, increased consumer purchasing power does not cause recovery, it is recovery. What the country needs is purchasing power. And that is what the country is getting; that is what is meant by an unbalanced budget, by a steadily rising public debt.

Roosevelt is keeping the unbalanced budget alive as a method of expanding purchasing power by promising to balance it in 1936, by implying that it is a temporary device, while yet in the same breath asking to increase the public debt by six billion dollars during the current year. If he actually does regard the device as a temporary one, then his astuteness is only unconscious, not Machiavellian, and in this case, it is entirely possible that he means to defiate purchasing power some day by balancing the budget at the expense of a future prosperity. But if he, if Professor Warren, are as discerning as I think they are, they must realize that there is only one reason why the national budget need ever be balanced, viz., to keep prices from rising. And they must, despite their public manifestoes to the contrary, have arrived considerably before their less thoughtful contemporaries at the inevitable conclusion that recovery means the creation and circulation of as great a quantity of money as is compatible with stable prices.